Do I know you from somewhere?

Do you have a picture on your LinkedIn/Twitter profile? And is it actually picture of you and not a cartoon dog?

I was trying to track down some old uni friends. Figuring that by now they should be pretty high in whatever career they had gone into I turned to LinkedIn. It is, after all, the network for the business person.

Now if you’re looking for someone with a reasonably uncommon name, it’s not too hard to find someone. And the first person has a name that’s totally unique on LinkedIn. So easy.

But for the second person I was looking for there were 138 results in the UK alone and in the world 450. And for some reason they hadn’t added our shared university to their profile so I couldn’t use that.

But luckily they had a photo and even though it’s a fair number of year since we left uni, they haven’t changed much. So that’s another connection made.

And for the third person there were 8,912 results. Adding our university reduced it down to 8. And again the photo came to the rescue and saved me from having to look at each profile in detail to work out which was the one I was looking for.

So photos – handy when people want to connect with you. And connecting with people – handy if you want to do business. Bit of no brainer really!